Company Announcements CETAC Technology entered into a marketing and partnership agreement with Coherent for its GeoLasPro Laser Ablation System in fall 2006. CETAC Technology named StarLab SaS as its Italian distributor in fall 2006. PANalytical, a Spectris company, opened a direct sales and support organization in Mexico in November 2006. The employees of PONA, the company’s Mexican agent for 13 years, joined PANalytical Mexico. In November 2006, Bruker AXS announced it had increased its number of support engineers by 30%. The company will also globally deploy its 24/7/365 process support program, which has existed in North America since 2001. Bruker AXS recently established new subsidiaries in Poland, Korea and India, as well as expanded its Chinese operations. Bruker AXS established a new business unit in Australia on January 1. The company had previously been represented by Sietronics, from which it has secured business management and service resources for the unit. Agilent Technologies and the University of Cincinnati opened the Metallomics Center of the Americas, a center to study the impact of metals on biological systems, a field known as metallomics. Product Introductions CETAC Technologies introduced the APS-1650 Automated Prep Station for the oil industry. It provides automated sample preparation for ICP-OES. Oxford Instruments Analytical launched the X MET3000TXR+ handheld XRF analyzer, its third generation of tube-based handheld XRF instruments. Sales/Orders of Note The US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory received a $8.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further develop its PHENIX software program for the automation of crystallography data acquisition and analysis. Spectro Analytical, an AMETEK company, announced the delivery of its 1,000th SPECTROMAXx metal analyzer in October 2006 to fittings specialist AWG. The product, introduced two years ago, has been successful in small- and mid-sized foundries and metal processing companies. In December 2006, Spectro announced the delivery of its 25,000th analytical instrument. The SPECTRO CIROS VISION ICP-OES spectrometer was purchased by Acme Analytical Laboratories in Vancouver, Canada to examine environmental and geological samples. PANalytical completed the assembly of its 2,000th X’PERT PRO x-ray diffractometer on November 30, 2006. The system is destined for the US Geological Survey in Denver, Colorado. The first units were introduced in 1999.